You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a
tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur,
tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and
would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance
on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of
all-engulfing night.